Sea and Sardinia — Chapter 2, s.1
THE SEA.
The fat old porter knocks.
Ah me, once more it is dark.
Get up again before dawn.
A dark sky outside, cloudy.
The thrilling tinkle of innumerable goat-bells as the first flock enters the city, such a rippling sound.
Well, it must be morning, even if one shivers at it.
And at least it does not rain.
* * * * * That pale, bluish, theatrical light outside, of the first dawn.
And a cold wind.
We come on to the wide, desolate quay, the curve of the harbour Panormus.
That horrible dawn-pallor of a cold sea out there.
And here, port mud, greasy: and fish: and refuse.
The American girl is with us, wrapped in her sweater.
A coarse, cold, black-slimy world, she seems as if she would melt away before it.
But these frail creatures, what a lot they can go through!
[Illustration: MAP FOR SEA AND SARDINIA] Across the great, wide, badly paved, mud-greasy, despairing road of the quay side, and to the sea.
There lies our steamer, over there in the dawn-dusk of the basin, half visible.
"That one who is smoking her cigarette," says the porter.
She looks little, beside the huge _City of Trieste_ who is lying up next her.
* * * * * Our row-boat is hemmed in by many empty boats, huddled to the side of the quay.
She works her way out like a sheepdog working his way out of a flock of sheep, or like a boat through pack-ice.
We are on the open basin.
The rower stands up and pushes the oars from him.
He gives a long, melancholy cry to someone on the quay.
The water goes chock-chock against the urging bows.
The wind is chill.
The fantastic peaks behind Palermo show half-ghostly in a half-dark sky.
The dawn seems reluctant to come.
Our steamer still smokes her cigarette--meaning the funnel-smoke--across there.
So, one sits still, and crosses the level space of half-dark water.
Masts of sailing-ships, and spars, cluster on the left, on the undarkening sky.
* * * * * Climb up, climb up, this is our ship.
Up we go, up the ladder.
"Oh but!"
says the American girl.
"Isn't she small!
Isn't she impossibly small!
Oh my, will you go in such a little thing?
Oh dear!
Thirty two hours in such a little boat?
Why no, I wouldn't care for it at all."
A bunch of stewards, cooks, waiters, engineers, pan-cleaners and what-not, mostly in black canvas jackets.
Nobody else on the ship.
A
little black bunch of loutish crew with nothing to do, and we the first passengers served up to be jeered at.
There you are, in the grey light.
"Who is going?"
"We two--the signorina is not going."
"Tickets!"
These are casual proletarian manners.
We are taken into the one long room with a long table and many maple-golden doors, alternate panels having a wedge-wood blue-and-white picture inserted--a would-be Goddess of white marble on a blue ground, like a health-salts Hygeia advertisement.
One of the plain panels opens--our cabin.
"Oh dear!
Why it isn't as big as a china-closet.
However will you get in!"
cries the American girl.
"One at a time," say I. "But it's the tiniest place I _ever_ saw."
It really was tiny.
One had to get into a bunk to shut the door.
That did not matter to me, I am no Titanic American.
I pitched the knapsack on one bunk, the kitchenino on the other, and we shut the door.
The cabin disappeared into a maple-wood panel of the long, subterranean state-room.
"Why, is this the only place you've got to sit in?"
cried the American girl.
"But how perfectly awful!
No air, and so dark, and smelly.
Why I never saw such a boat!
Will you really go?
Will you really!"
The state-room was truly rather subterranean and stuffy, with nothing but a long table and an uncanny company of screw-pin chairs seated thereat, and no outlet to the air at all, but it was not so bad otherwise, to me who have never been out of Europe.
Those maple-wood panels and ebony curves--and those Hygeias!
They went all round, even round the curve at the dim, distant end, and back up the near side.
Yet how beautiful old, gold-coloured maple-wood is!
how very lovely, with the ebony curves of the door arch!
There was a wonderful old-fashioned, Victorian glow in it, and a certain splendour.
Even one could bear the Hygeias let in under glass--the colour was right, that wedge-wood and white, in such lovely gold lustre.
There was a certain homely grandeur still in the days when this ship was built: a richness of choice material.
And health-salts Hygeias, wedge-wood Greek goddesses on advertisement placards!
Yet they _weren't_ advertisements.
That was what really worried me.
They never had been.
Perhaps Weego's Health Salts stole her later.
* * * * * We have no coffee--that goes without saying.
Nothing doing so early.
The crew still stands in a gang, exactly like a gang of louts at a street-corner.
And they've got the street all to themselves--this ship.
We climb to the upper deck.
* * * * * She is a long, slender, old steamer with one little funnel.
And she seems so deserted, now that one can't see the street-corner gang of the casual crew.
They are just below.
Our ship is deserted.
The dawn is wanly blueing.
The sky is a curdle of cloud, there is a bit of pale gold eastwards, beyond Monte Pellegrino.
The wind blows across the harbour.
The hills behind Palermo prick up their ears on the sky-line.
The city lies unseen, near us and level.
There--a big ship is coming in: the Naples boat.
And the little boats keep putting off from the near quay, and coming to us.
We watch.
A stout officer, cavalry, in grayey-green, with a big dark-blue cloak lined with scarlet.
The scarlet lining keeps flashing.
He has a little beard, and his uniform is not quite clean.
He has big wooden chests, tied with rope, for luggage.
Poor and of no class.
Yet that scarlet, splendid lining, and the spurs.
It seems a pity they must go second-class.
Yet so it is, he goes forward when the dock porter has hoisted those wooden boxes.
No fellow-passenger yet.
Boats still keep coming.
Ha-ha!
Here is the commissariat!
Various sides of kid, ready for roasting: various chickens: fennel like celery: wine in a bottiglione: new bread: packages!
Hand them up, hand them up.
"Good food!"
cries the q-b in anticipation.
It must be getting near time to go.
Two more passengers--young thick men in black broad-cloth standing up in the stern of a little boat, their hands in their pockets, looking a little cold about the chin.
Not quite Italian, too sturdy and manly.
Sardinians from Cagliari, as a matter of fact.
* * * * * We go down from the chill upper-deck.
It is growing full day.
Bits of pale gold are flying among delicate but cold flakes of cloud from the east, over Monte Pellegrino, bits of very new turquoise sky come out.
Palermo on the left crouches upon her all-harbour--a little desolate, disorderly, end-of-the-world, end-of-the-sea, along her quay front.
Even from here we can see the yellow carts rattling slowly, the mules nodding their high weird plumes of scarlet along the broad weary harbour-side.
Oh painted carts of Sicily, with all history on your panels!
* * * * * Arrives an individual at our side.
"The captain fears it will not be possible to start.
There is much wind outside.
Much wind!"
How they _love_ to come up with alarming, disquieting, or annoying news!
The joy it gives them.
What satisfaction on all the faces: of course all the other loafers are watching us, the street-corner loungers of this deck.
But we have been many times bitten.
"Ah ma!"
say I, looking at the sky, "not so much wind as all that."
An air of quiet, shrugging indifference is most effectual: as if you knew all about it, a good deal more than they knew.
"Ah si!
Molto vento!
Molto vento!
Outside!
Outside!"
With a long face and a dramatic gesture he points out of the harbour, to the grey sea.
I too look out of the harbour at the pale line of sea beyond the mole.
But I do not trouble to answer, and my eye is calm.
So he goes away, only half triumphant.
* * * * * "Things seem to get worse and worse!"
cries the American friend.
"What will you do on such a boat if you have an awful time out in the Mediterranean here?
Oh no--will you risk it, really?
Won't you go from Civita Vecchia?"
"How awful it will be!"
cries the q-b, looking round the grey harbour, the many masts clustering in the grey sky on the right: the big Naples boat turning her posterior to the quay-side a little way off, and cautiously budging backwards: the almost entirely shut-in harbour: the bits of blue and flying white cloud overhead: the little boats like beetles scuttling hither and thither across the basin: the thick crowd on the quay come to meet the Naples boat.
* * * * * Time!
Time!
The American friend must go.
She bids us goodbye, more than sympathetically.
"I shall be awfully interested to hear how you get on."
So down the side she goes.
The boatman wants twenty francs--wants more--but doesn't get it.
He gets ten, which is five too much.
And so, sitting rather small and pinched and cold-looking, huddled in her sweater, she bibbles over the ripply water to the distant stone steps.
We wave farewell.
But other traffic comes between us.
And the q-b, feeling nervous, is rather cross because the American friend's ideas of luxury have put us in such a poor light.
We feel like the poorest of poor sea-faring relations.
* * * * * Our ship is hooting for all she's worth.
An important last-minuter comes surging up.
The rope hawsers are being wound clankily in.
Seagulls--they are never very many in the Mediterranean--seagulls whirl like a few flakes of snow in the upper chill air.
Clouds spin.
And without knowing it we are evaporating away from the shore, from our mooring, between the great _City of Trieste_ and another big black steamer that lies like a wall.
We breathe towards this second black wall of steamer: distinctly.
And of course an individual in an official cap is standing on the bottom of our departure ladder just above the water, yelling Barca!
Barca!
--shouting for a boat.
And an old man on the sea stands up to his oars and comes pushing his clumsy boat with gathering speed between us and the other black wall.
There he stands away below there, small, firing his clumsy boat along, remote as if in a picture on the dark green water.
And our black side insidiously and evilly aspires to the other huge black wall.
He rows in the canyon between, and is nearly here.
When lo, the individual on the bottom step turns in the other direction.
Another boat from the open basin is sweeping up: it is a race: she is near, she is nearer, she is up.
With a curvet the boat from the open rounds up at the ladder.
The boat between the gulf backs its oars.
The official individual shouts and waves, the old man backing his oars in the gulf below yells expostulation, the boat from the open carries off its prey, our ship begins slowly to puddle-puddle-puddle, working her screw, the man in the gulf of green water rows for his life--we are floating into the open basin.
Slowly, slowly we turn round: and as the ship turns, our hearts turn.
Palermo fades from our consciousness: the Naples boat, the disembarking crowds, the rattling carriages to the land--the great _City of Trieste_--all fades from our heart.
We see only the open gap of the harbour entrance, and the level, pale-grey void of the sea beyond.
There are wisps of gleamy light--out there.
And out there our heart watches--though Palermo is near us, just behind.
We look round, and see it all behind us--but already it is gone, gone from our heart.
The fresh wind, the gleamy wisps of light, the running, open sea beyond the harbour bars.
* * * * * And so we steam out.
And almost at once the ship begins to take a long, slow, dizzy dip, and a fainting swoon upwards, and a long, slow, dizzy dip, slipping away from beneath one.
The q-b turns pale.
Up comes the deck in that fainting swoon backwards--then down it fades in that indescribable slither forwards.
It is all quite gentle--quite, quite gentle.
But oh, so long, and so slow, and so dizzy.
"Rather pleasant!"
say I to the q-b. "Yes.
Rather lovely _really_," she answers wistfully.
To tell the truth there is something in the long, slow lift of the ship, and her long, slow slide forwards which makes my heart beat with joy.
It is the motion of freedom.
To feel her come up--then slide slowly forward, with a sound of the smashing of waters, is like the magic gallop of the sky, the magic gallop of elemental space.
That long, slow, waveringly rhythmic rise and fall of the ship, with waters snorting as it were from her nostrils, oh God what a joy it is to the wild innermost soul.
One is free at last--and lilting in a slow flight of the elements, winging outwards.
Oh God, to be free of all the hemmed-in life--the horror of human tension, the absolute insanity of machine persistence.
The agony which a train is to me, really.
And the long-drawn-out agony of a life among tense, resistant people on land.
And then to feel the long, slow lift and drop of this almost empty ship, as she took the waters.
Ah God, liberty, liberty, elemental liberty.
I wished in my soul the voyage might last forever, that the sea had no end, that one might float in this wavering, tremulous, yet long and surging pulsation while ever time lasted: space never exhausted, and no turning back, no looking back, even.
* * * * * The ship was almost empty--save of course for the street-corner louts who hung about just below, on the deck itself.
We stood alone on the weather-faded little promenade deck, which has old oak seats with old, carved little lions at the ends, for arm-rests--and a little cabin mysteriously shut, which much peeping determined as the wireless office and the operator's little curtained bed-niche.
* * * * * Cold, fresh wind, a black-blue, translucent, rolling sea on which the wake rose in snapping foam, and Sicily on the left: Monte Pellegrino, a huge, inordinate mass of pinkish rock, hardly crisped with the faintest vegetation, looming up to heaven from the sea.
Strangely large in mass and bulk Monte Pellegrino looks: and bare, like a Sahara in heaven: and old-looking.
These coasts of Sicily are very imposing, terrific, fortifying the interior.
And again one gets the feeling that age has worn them bare: as if old, old civilisations had worn away and exhausted the soil, leaving a terrifying blankness of rock, as at Syracuse in plateaus, and here in a great mass.
* * * * * There seems hardly any one on board but ourselves: we alone on the little promenade deck.
Strangely lonely, floating on a bare old ship past the great bare shores, on a rolling sea, stooping and rising in the wind.
The wood of the fittings is all bare and weather-silvered, the cabin, the seats, even the little lions of the seats.
The paint wore away long ago: and this timber will never see paint any more.
Strange to put one's hand on the old oaken wood, so sea-fibred.
Good old delicate-threaded oak: I swear it grew in England.
And everything so carefully done, so solidly and everlastingly.
I look at the lions, with the perfect-fitting oaken pins through their paws clinching them down, and their little mouths open.
They are as solid as they were in Victorian days, as immovable.
They will never wear away.
What a joy in the careful, thorough, manly, everlasting work put into a ship: at least into this sixty-year-old vessel.
Every bit of this old oak wood so sound, so beautiful: and the whole welded together with joints and wooden pins far more beautifully and livingly than iron welds.
Rustless, life-born, living-tissued old wood: rustless as flesh is rustless, and happy-seeming as iron never can be.
She rides so well, she takes the sea so beautifully, as a matter of course.
* * * * * Various members of the crew wander past to look at us.
This little promenade deck is over the first-class quarters, full in the stern.
So we see first one head then another come up the ladder--mostly bare heads: and one figure after another slouches past, smoking a cigarette.
All crew.
At last the q-b stops one of them--it is what they are all waiting for, an opportunity to talk--and asks if the weird object on the top of Pellegrino is a ruin.
Could there be a more touristy question!
No, it is the semaphore station.
Slap in the eye for the q-b!
She doesn't mind, however, and the member of the crew proceeds to converse.
He is a weedy, hollow-cheeked town-product: a Palermitan.
He wears faded blue over-alls and informs us he is the ship's carpenter: happily unemployed for the rest of his life, apparently, and taking it as rather less than his dues.
The ship once did the Naples-Palermo course--a very important course--in the old days of the General Navigation Company.
The General Navigation Company sold her for eighty thousand liras years ago, and now she was worth two million.
We pretend to believe: but I make a poor show.
I am thoroughly sick to death of the sound of liras.
No man can overhear ten words of Italian today without two thousand or two million or ten or twenty or two liras flying like venomous mosquitoes round his ears.
Liras--liras--liras--nothing else.
Romantic, poetic, cypress-and-orange-tree Italy is gone.
Remains an Italy smothered in the filthy smother of innumerable Lira notes: ragged, unsavoury paper money so thick upon the air that one breathes it like some greasy fog.
Behind this greasy fog some people may still see the Italian sun.
I find it hard work.
Through this murk of Liras you peer at Michael Angelo and at Botticelli and the rest, and see them all as through a glass, darkly.
For heavy around you is Italy's after-the-war atmosphere, darkly pressing you, squeezing you, milling you into dirty paper notes.
King Harry was lucky that they only wanted to coin him into gold.
Italy wants to mill you into filthy paper Liras.
* * * * * Another head--and a black alpaca jacket and a serviette this time--to tell us coffee is ready.
Not before it is time, too.
We go down into the subterranean state-room and sit on the screw-pin chairs, while the ship does the slide-and-slope trot under us, and we drink a couple of cups of coffee-and-milk, and eat a piece of bread and butter.
At least one of the innumerable members of the crew gives me one cup, then casts me off.
It is most obviously his intention that I shall get no more: because of course the innumerable members of the crew could all just do with another coffee and milk.
However, though the ship heaves and the alpaca coats cluster menacingly in the doorway, I balance my way to the tin buffet and seize the coffee pot and the milk pot, and am quite successful in administering to the q-b and myself.
Having restored the said vessels to their tin altar, I resume my spin chair at the long and desert board.
The q-b and I are alone--save that in the distance a very fat back with gold-braid collar sits sideways and a fat hand disposes of various papers--he is part of the one-and-only table, of course.
The tall lean alpaca jacket, with a face of yellow stone and a big black moustache moves from the outer doorway, glowers at our filled cups, and goes to the tin altar and touches the handles of the two vessels: just touches them to an arrangement: as one who should say: These are mine.
What dirty foreigner dares help himself!
* * * * * As quickly as possible we stagger up from the long dungeon where the alpaca jackets are swooping like blue-bottles upon the coffee pots, into the air.
There the carpenter is waiting for us, like a spider.
"Isn't the sea a little quieter?"
says the q-b wistfully.
She is growing paler.
"No, Signora--how should it be?"
says the gaunt-faced carpenter.
"The wind is waiting for us behind Cape Gallo.
You see that cape?"
he points to a tall black cliff-front in the sea ahead.
"When we get to that cape we get the wind and the sea.
Here--" he makes a gesture--"it is moderate."
"Ugh!"
says the q-b, turning paler.
"I'm going to lie down."
She disappears.
The carpenter, finding me stony ground, goes forward, and I see him melting into the crowd of the innumerable crew, that hovers on the lower-deck passage by the kitchen and the engines.
* * * * * The clouds are flying fast overhead: and sharp and isolated come drops of rain, so that one thinks it must be spray.
But no, it is a handful of rain.
The ship swishes and sinks forward, gives a hollow thudding and rears slowly backward, along this pinkish lofty coast of Sicily that is just retreating into a bay.
From the open sea comes the rain, come the long waves.
* * * * * No shelter.
One must go down.
The q-b lies quietly in her bunk.
The state-room is stale like a passage on the underground railway.
No shelter, save near the kitchen and the engines, where there is a bit of warmth.
The cook is busy cleaning fish, making the whiting bite their tails venomously at a little board just outside his kitchen-hole.
A slow stream of kitchen-filth swilkers back and forth along the ship's side.
A
gang of the crew leans near me--a larger gang further down.
Heaven knows what they can all be--but they never do anything but stand in gangs and talk and eat and smoke cigarettes.
They are mostly young--mostly Palermitan--with a couple of unmistakable Neapolitans, having the peculiar Neapolitan hang-dog good looks, the chiselled cheek, the little black moustache, the large eyes.
But they chew with their cheeks bulged out, and laugh with their fine, semi-sarcastic noses.
